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Deadliest Journeys – Papua New Guinea

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Papua New Guinea sits just 150 kilometres north of Australia, and getting from one city to the next can still get you killed.

The French investigative series Les Routes de l’Impossible, distributed in English as “Deadliest Journeys,” sends its crew into Papua New Guinea to document a transport system that barely qualifies as one. Port Moresby, the capital, has no overland road connection to any other major city in the country — everything moves by unpaved track or small aircraft. The documentary centers on Lae, the nation’s industrial and economic hub, where a nickname says it all: locals call it “Pothole City.”

• Lae, PNG’s economic capital, is nicknamed “Pothole City” for its decayed roads, constant rain, and mud traps.
• Armed criminal gangs known as raskols run roadblocks, carjackings, and ambushes along corridors like the Highlands Highway.
• The Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary is so under-resourced and compromised that transport operators rely on armed private security convoys instead.

Pothole City and the Missing Road Network

Papua New Guinea is roughly half the size of France, yet it has almost no functioning road grid to show for it. Just a handful of routes connect the country’s population centers, and none of them qualify as reliably paved. Heavy tropical rainfall turns Lae’s streets into standing water and mud within hours, and the packed minibuses that serve as public transit lurch through craters that swallow tires whole.

For a country that depends on road freight to move goods from its ports into the highlands, this isn’t a cosmetic problem — it’s an economic bottleneck. Fuel, produce, and manufactured goods all have to survive the same battered corridors before they reach market, and every trip carries the risk of a breakdown in territory nobody controls.

The Raskols and the Highlands Highway

The bigger threat isn’t the terrain — it’s the people waiting on it. Heavily armed gangs known locally as raskols stake out stretches of the Highlands Highway and other arterial routes, running roadblocks, carjackings, and ambushes on drivers who have no way to call for backup. These aren’t opportunistic muggings; they’re organized operations targeting the trucks and buses that keep the country’s trade moving.

Papua New Guinea has one of the highest crime rates on the planet — and its own capital, Lae, is known simply as “Pothole City.”

The result is a kind of informal toll system enforced at gunpoint, layered on top of a road network that’s already falling apart. Drivers who survive the potholes still have to survive the raskols waiting past the next bend.

Policing Without Power

The Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary is supposed to be the answer, but the documentary makes clear it isn’t. The force is severely under-resourced, widely seen as corrupt, and largely ineffective at maintaining order on the roads it’s meant to secure. That vacuum is what pushes ordinary transport into the hands of private operators instead of the state.

It’s a pattern seen in other high-crime environments covered elsewhere in this space, from the gang-controlled blocks of Tivoli and Trench Town in Kingston to the barrios profiled in Venezuela’s most dangerous city — official policing collapses, and residents build their own workarounds to survive daily life.

Convoys as the Only Contingency

With no trustworthy police presence, businesses in Lae and along the highlands routes pay for armed private security convoys just to move fuel, goods, and passengers through the jungle and mountain terrain. It’s the only practical alternative to leaving trucks exposed to raskol ambushes, and it’s become a standard cost of doing business in a country where the state can’t guarantee safe passage on its own roads.

That’s the trade-off the documentary keeps returning to: infrastructure so broken that a 150-kilometre stretch to the nearest major town requires hired guns riding shotgun, in a country that’s supposed to be a short flight from Australian shores.